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Sunday, October 14, 2007

The Rule of Law

Glenn Greenwald has an excellent post (once again) this AM about the Rule of Law. If you care about your country, whatever country and wherever you may be, you owe it to yourself to read this column. It sums up so much of what has gone awry in America in the last six years. The observation is an elementary one: The very bedrock of a free and democratic government is the rule of law administered by an independent judiciary. The current effort by Bush, many in Congress (including Democrats, including Hillary) and now the media (the Washington Post as cited in Greenwald's post) to pass a law exempting large telecom firms from law suits in the warrant less wire tapping scandal most certainly flies in the face of the rule of law.

As a country, America is now in the position of having followed a Constitution protecting individual liberties for 200 years. It is in the position of having passed a law in 1978, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which protected Americans against the abuses of its government by the Nixon and previous administrations. But because of George W. Bush unilaterally deciding to violate the Constitution and break the law, involving the telecoms in his perfidy, we are now in the position of passing another law to counteract both the Constitution and FISA.

America will then be in the position of having to pass yet another law overturning the law that overturned the FISA law, if we are to come out of this with our Constitution bruised but intact.